What courage looks like

For those who still confuse the posing and posturing in politics with courage, this is a reminder of what it really looks like.

France Mourns the Death of Its "Mother Courage"

"Few people would have pegged Marie-Laure Picat as a likely heroine. The portly, plain-looking 37-year-old lived quietly in a village in central France, shunned attention, and said her only real quirk was an adoration of the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants. But on Aug. 10, when it was revealed that Picat had died the previous day, most of France spared a thought - and shed a tear - for the mother who spent what she knew would be the last year of her life fighting to guarantee that her four children would remain together once she had gone.

'After Astonishing France, Marie-Laure Dies Of Cancer,' read the headline of daily le Parisien's story about Picat's Aug. 9 passing. "The Death of Mother Courage,' echoed France Soir. 'Marie-Laure Picat: The End Of a Battle,' observed the website agoravox.fr. (See pictures of cancer survivors' inspirational stories.)

But while Picat's death marked her lost fight with cancer, it also signaled the end of her victorious war to ensure her children would grow up together as a family after she died. After learning that the liver cancer doctors had detected in July 2008 had become incurable, and knowing that her husband, from whom she was divorced, was unable to care for their children, Picat immediately began the search for a foster family. At first, her quest was seemingly impossible: to find a family with a home close to hers, in her Loiret village of Puiseaux, that would welcome all four of her kids as its own.

'When I found out I was terminal, I knew there was one thing I had to do: protect my children,' Picat said in a March interview with TV channel TF1. 'I needed to be sure they'd be able to live normally.'

Incredibly, Picat found the right family less than a kilometer from her house. However, authorities told her that the final choice of who took care of her children wasn't hers - French social services would have to handle their placement. They also noted even if social workers approved the foster home Picat selected, it could only take in three children maximum, meaning one of her children would have to live somewhere else. (Read: 'Why American Cancer Deaths are Rising.')

So Picat decided to do something she later admitted bothered her: she took her story to the media. The press descended in droves upon the tiny village and, before long, news of Picat's struggle had made her a national heroine.

Within three weeks of Picat going public in December, French authorities granted a waiver allowing all four of her children to live under the same roof with the family she'd chosen for them. President Nicolas Sarkozy hosted Picat and her kids - Julie, 12; Thibault, 9; Matthieu 5; and Margot, 3 - at the ElysÉe. The family was invited to Disneyland Paris for Christmas - a longtime dream that had been put on hold due to lack of funds. (See pictures of Sarkozy celebrating Bastille Day.)"

The most powerful courage is having the kind of love that makes one willing to challenge power when it asserts its will without regard to your own self-determined course, not when you exercise your will over others or cower before its use. The latter is called aggression. And cowardice. It is its opposite.

We are just too cowardly, is the truth, to face that fact.

And we are cowardly because we lack the kind of love, for ourselves, for our children, for others, that a woman like Marie-Laure Picat clearly had.

If we are looking for a truer north for what progress looks like, this is the direction to look.

Health care and liberalism

A thoughtful, if still too market-unfriendly discussion in the Wall Street Journal, today.

Health debate isn't about health

But this is encouraging:

"The real point is that there are ways out of this box. One would be to make a public-insurance plan merely a fallback, to be exercised only if private insurers aren't offering enough options in all markets. The other would be to take the suggestion of Senate moderates and replace the public option with nonprofit insurance cooperatives as an alternative that doesn't require the government to be directly in the business. In an environment less charged with arguments about government's proper role in the economy, both might be easier for each side to accept."

That second proposal would be a way forward that is much more genuinely consistent with liberal values. Ironic that "liberals" would likely make the biggest stink about such a proposal. But most of those folks aren't really all that liberal, when it comes down to it, except as a means of getting whatever what they want when they want it. Meaning, not very liberal at all.

The more liberal path takes liberal values - meaning liberty - seriously. It takes seriously a free market, a free democracy, and the need for voluntary commitments from citizens rather than solutions imposed as a matter of government fiat.

The more liberal path recognizes that power that is used to try to manipulate the consciences and actions of citizens will never even come close to the genuine and voluntary commitments of liberal democratic citizens. There's a reason Stalin and Hitler lost. And it wasn't the porn staches.

It is those sincere and voluntary commitments that make liberal democracies more genuinely strong. And it is where we force otherwise as a function of our lack of faith in ourselves and one another where we are weak.

The failure of humanity to recognize this distinction and to romanticize and defend the weakness and cowardice in aggression as a means of bullying others to get our way is responsible for most of the serious avoidable tragedy that human beings have inflicted on one another. It is one of the most serious and persistent mistakes in human history. Tragically, it was responsible for more death and destruction in the 20th century, in terms of total number of people killed, than perhaps any other century in human history. And it was the vindication of its more liberal alternatives that looked to be the surest lesson from that century.

Until liberal peoples decided that they could no longer bear their liberality any more.